


Remember Me

by ProwlingThunder



Category: Remember Me (Video Game)
Genre: Deliberate Not Tagging Of Things, Fix-it fic, Gen, Post-Game, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 15:38:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4711250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week before her shop opens, two strangers walk into her life again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Помни меня](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13528215) by [Britt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britt/pseuds/Britt), [ProwlingThunder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder)



“I'm not open,” Nilin says when the bell chimes, not bothering to look up from where she's putting together a three 3D model on her table. Neurology isn't a thing she actually studied, exactly, but it's something she knows intimately regardless. Psychology, too, but that came to her naturally, something she had always known.

Her face is all over Neo-Paris still. Still an Errorist, still swathed in orange. Opening up a Lost Memory practice anywhere in the world is a fundamentally bad idea, but Neo-Tokyo is an easy place to vanish, even with such a prestigious occupation. Changing her name and identity was a little harder, but although her parents could do nothing about her criminal history in Neo-Paris, smuggling her out of the country and getting her a new identity had been easy for them.

She wasn't Nilin, and she wasn't Cartier-Wells, and she couldn't be tracked by those names. But those memories were still hers; the life was still hers. She knows who she was, and who she is.

But there is nothing in Neo-Paris except an old and beaten crew. One day, perhaps, she'll go back to the Leaky Brain. Not now. But one day.

“She's the memory hunter,” someone says; her customer who shouldn't be.

Nilin turns the model to work on the other side. “I'm not open for business yet. Come back next week.”

“Remember Me?” Another voice purred, and Nilin doesn't recognize it, but there's a note of familiarity in the tone. It's a tone that thinks it knows her, which is ridiculous. Nilin doesn't know a single person here except her landlord and the people who bag her groceries. She has no neighbors of note, and she didn't tell her parents where her new identity was going. Even if there were Errorists she didn't remember, she's pretty sure they wouldn't be walking into a recovery shop.

She'd thought the shop name was pretty clever. 

She didn't expect a lot of business, here in Neo-Tokyo. It wasn't like Neo-Paris; they didn't cling to their implants like France did. Mostly she expected her clientele to be kids looking for lost puppies, or someone trying to figure out where their girlfriend went wrong. Maybe a few police offers, trying to recall the haze of a midnight memory. Little things.

She already had three people scheduled for the first week. All of them older widows, who wanted to recall their husbands one last time before they lost the memory completely. None of them had a Sensen, and all of them were friends of her landlord. She wouldn't even be paid for them, but she hadn't crafted the idea of Remember Me on the hopes she'd be rich. She already had more money than she needed, and she didn't want any of it.

She imagined Edge would have liked it. 

Liked them. The Sensen had been his prison and his torture, and the more people who existed without them, the better Edge would have felt. Nilin had come to realize it was mostly older people who went without, possibly those who's own parents had refused to allow them in their youth, and the youngest, who were rebelling against their parents. She thought it might go in cycles in Neo-Tokyo; skip a generation or two. It was a beautiful thing to see.

Nilin turns to face the door, the three people standing just inside her shop. One she recognizes as a daily passer-by, the woman who's always wearing the same neon-green scarf. The other two she doesn't know; they both have short-trimmed hair, dark in color, skin European-pale on one and Mediterranean tan on the other. The paler of the two she has a few inches on, the darker one stands several inches higher than her.

She doesn't know them. Not from Neo-Tokyo, not from Neo-Paris.

The Mediterranean crooks a smile at her, amusement dancing in his eyes. 

“No surprise. You always were the best at this,” the European says, and his voice she doesn't recognize either, but he speaks the same as his friend; he thinks he knows her, and cares for her as well. 

The woman is plainly oblivious to Nilin's personal thoughts. She smiles, fingers playing with the end of her scarf, her eyes fixed on the taller pair. Her cheeks are flushed with blood. Nilin is pretty sure it's not from the wind outside, which is nonexistent. “She's the only one with a practice in Neo-Tokyo. Does it suit?”

“It does,” the Mediterranean smiles at her, but it's different somehow. Honest and false at the same time, like looking through a kaleidoscope and seeing colors of a black and white image. His words carry an inflection that doesn't fit his, the way they fall off his tongue is something... different. It tickles at her memories, trying to find a place to settle. “Thank you for your help, Makoto. My brother and I would never have found it on our own.”

The woman, Makoto, blushes even more, and then she buries her nose in her scarf and backs out of Nilin's shop, embarrassed and flustered by the attention. It leaves Nilin alone with two strangers looking for a memory hunter.

She keeps one hand behind her, fingers curled around the screwdriver she's using. It's not much, but it will stun. Maybe kill. “How can I help you gentlemen? Like I said, the shop isn't open until next week; I can schedule you an appointment, if you like?”

“Our memories are fine, little sister,” the Mediterranean's smile is soft when he looks at her, and a little sad. Bittersweet, maybe. The terminology makes her hackles raise in discomfort, an animal ready to bite back; only one person had ever called her that, and she doesn't like to hear it from another's mouth. “It doesn't hurt anymore. I don't hurt anymore.” He puts tense on the pronoun, I; like it's supposed to mean something profound, and the stress of it in his voice has her holding the screwdriver in a white-knuckled grip.

She remembers: I didn't lie. I want to die. 

The pain is dissolving, and I go with it.

The idea is so far beyond the realm of possibility that it's laughable, unbelievable, and yet, she wants it. Her friend, her brother, and she missed him, she wants him back so much it hurts. Some nights she talks to him, and the empty echo in her head is a physical ache in her chest. She hadn't realized how much it hurt until presented with the possibility she could have him back, and she doesn't know what to do.

“...Edge,” she manages, and her voice shakes more than she would like, but he's heard her worse off, if it is him. “Is that you?”

His smile stretches wide, splits his face. His eyes dance with something different than humor. “I'm here, Nilin.”

She wants to go to him and hug him, strange body and all, because she missed him and he's here, and no one else could ever make her feel better like he did. 

She wants to throw the screwdriver at him, because he made her kill him, his death is in her hands and it hurts.

She doesn't know what to do. Instead she flicks her attention to the European next to him, briefly, shooting Edge an unspoken question. He's not an Errorist, and she knows all of them, now. Edge would never trust anybody else.

“You don't recognize him either,” Edge says, the timber of his voice strange and unfamiliar, but the way his words sit... Those she remembers. They cloy in her veins like honey. “Its different, being on the outside. Finding him proved significantly more difficult than I had anticipated once you shut H3O down.”

“You can split me open if you like,” he offers, “I'd love to let you take some more of me,” and Nilin remembers him at once, the memories, the meeting, what they had done to him. Bad Request smiles at her in a body that isn't his, and she thinks she wants to break, remembering the bright-eyed young man eager to meet her and desperate to help, who had held on to just enough of himself to save her life at the very end of his. 

She lets go of the screwdriver and leans heavily on the table, remembering and lost and found all together at once. Bad Request shares a look with Edge that she can't decipher, and then Edge steps forward and makes his way around the counter to her. He draws her up in his arms and rests his jaw on the crown of her head, and she clings to a body that isn't his.

“I've always wanted to hold you this way,” he murmurs into her hair, and Nilin lets him wrap her up in the warmth of a real body he's never had. She senses when Bad Request approaches, and reaches out from the security of Edge's arms to grab hold of his shirt and drag him in. Edge permits it, but it traps his arm between them and her arms are at a bad angle around Bad Request and it's perfect, it's right.

“I've missed you,” she tells them, and they hug her tighter.

Bad Request presses his lips into her shoulder and she can feel his words through the fabric of her clothes. “We said we'd remember you soon, Nilin.”

**Author's Note:**

> After a year of working on it, it is finally _complete_. Bless. Why was the ending so hard to do.
> 
> Update:  
> My first fanwork! Yay! Done by the dear [Britt](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Britt/pseuds/Britt), this fic has been translated into Russian! Read [here](http://www.ficbook.net/readfic/4655959)!


End file.
